NEWS ANALYSIS; Spotlight Recasts Church Leaders and Their Support

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Published: May 24, 2008

When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, an influential megachurch pastor from Texas made an early endorsement that helped him win over skeptical evangelical conservatives.

That pastor was the Rev. John C. Hagee.

At the time, Mr. Hagee was pretty much the same public person he is today: a hard-line pro-Israel preacher and best-selling author whose evangelistic enterprise was built on apocalyptic prophecies that many Jews, Roman Catholics and other Christians found disturbing. Yet it was never an issue when Mr. Bush's campaign trumpeted the support of Mr. Hagee, as well as that of multimedia evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Eight years later, Mr. Hagee's presidential endorsement is suddenly more a curse than a blessing.

On Thursday, four months after Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican candidate, stood next to Mr. Hagee at a news conference and announced how delighted he was to have his endorsement, Mr. McCain renounced it. He acted after a Web site released a recording of a sermon in which Mr. Hagee said Hitler and the Holocaust had been part of God's plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive them to Palestine.

Mr. McCain also rejected the endorsement of the Rev. Rod Parsley, an Ohio pastor who had been retooling his church into a get-out-the-vote machine for Republicans. The problem for Mr. McCain was that Mr. Parsley was vocally anti-Islam.

Presidential candidates have always had to vet their vice-presidential candidates, their consultants, their pollsters and their major donors. Campaign 2008 is proving that they also have to vet their members of the clergy.

It started with Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the leading Democratic candidate, who denounced his own former pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., after Mr. Wright aired his Afro-centric version of conspiracy thinking at the National Press Club.

Then liberals and Democrats insisted that Mr. McCain's endorsers among the clergy also be scrutinized.

Preachers who gain large followings precisely because they can whip up their flocks with compelling performances from the pulpit can turn toxic when those performances are aired before the broader public.

''As Jeremiah Wright discovered, what you say inside really often gets you into trouble outside,'' said James L. Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

''There are certain kinds of language, certain interpretations that are really meant for insiders, and take on a different interpretive frame outside the community,'' Dr. Guth said. ''Any religious tradition runs that risk.''

Mr. McCain did not renounce Mr. Parsley's endorsement until one of Mr. Parsley's fire-and-brimstone sermons was seen on television and the Internet. In it, he proclaimed, ''Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world.''

Fear-mongering about Islam has become a staple of some well-known evangelical preachers since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, so Mr. Parsley's assertions might not sound outrageous to the ears of evangelicals.

However, said John C. Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, ''Now we are much more attentive to the fact that Muslim Americans are a part of our communities, and that in a religiously diverse country there has to be a civil discourse.''

In previous campaigns, there was little stigma for a politician who cozied up to a controversial clergyman. Mr. Bush pursued the endorsements of Mr. Robertson and Mr. Falwell in 2000, largely because he was competing for conservative Christian voters against evangelical darlings like Gary L. Bauer, Alan Keyes and Steve Forbes.

Two years earlier, Mr. Robertson had created a flutter of controversy when he said that if Disney World kept opening its doors to gay events, ''I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you.''

Mr. Bush welcomed Mr. Robertson's support in 2000 and 2004, and last year, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, also triumphantly accepted Mr. Robertson's backing. But Mr. Robertson had such a long history of outrageous remarks that perhaps people had stopped being outraged. And Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the race before Mr. Wright brought more scrutiny to candidates' clerical companions.

It is too early to tell how Mr. McCain's disavowal of Mr. Hagee and Mr. Parsley will affect the conservative evangelical voting bloc that he was trying to win over.

Grant Wacker, professor of Christian history at the Duke University Divinity School, said, ''McCain doesn't have much to lose in disassociating himself from Hagee, because he really does represent a marginalized subculture within evangelism.''

Mr. Green said he expected that in the future politicians would scrub their endorsers among the clergy more carefully.

''That doesn't mean that candidates are going to give up pursuing religious voters, and it doesn't mean that pastors and religious leaders are not key,'' he said. ''But candidates are going to be much more cautious.''